Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Muz]

I take it none of you here have ever had the experience of 2400 baud?

It was pretty much the same. Just that things were a hell lot uglier. I remember putting a text version of my site and a graphical version because a few gifs took forever to load. Forums were just all text. IRC actually lagged.. these days I could get throttled for using too much bandwidth but IRC would still be fast. I guess no videos, and porn was impossible, but digital cameras were still stupidly expensive back then anyway.

My biggest pet peeve is people who just whack away at the 'next' button during installs without reading anything and then wonder why it didn't work right.

If I read everything while installing, I'd be spending hours installing. Literally the main reason I buy NVidia over ATI these days is that there's less stuff to read when updating drivers


Heh, back to the OP, I do some networking engineering. Networks are a pretty abstract concept, but my favorite analogy is to think of it like a road system. Bandwidth is like the size of the road. You don't "run out" of it, it's just slow when too many are using it at the same time (and you get collisions).

There's a lot of things affecting it. The main one is really the speed of everything on the route. You might have a 1 MBps speed, but if the server you're connecting to only gives you 5 kbps, you only get 5 kbps, which is why I usually stick to minimum bandwidth to save money. If you want to compare speed, do it with speedtest (or at least test it on the same sites), and do it at the same time as your friend since some times are more than others.

Other factors might include your network card speed, drivers, processor speed, RAM, and operating system. Yup, even processor and OS. Network cards do much of their work in the card itself these days, but if you have a crappy one, the burden would be on the processor itself.

I don't really blame the router. Router's sort of like the traffic light, can't do much about them.. ISPs can be a bit funny though. They will give lower priority to people who use more bandwidth (assuming you're not given a hard limit). Usually they won't tell you. They'll also give higher priority for people who pay for more bandwidth, regardless of whether they're actually giving more bandwidth.

And over all, I hate torrents. They literally flood the system with lots of small packets. The problem with TCP is that it tries to gives all connections equal priority. So if you open one to access YouTube and someone opens a dozen connections to download a movie, that someone gets 12 times more overall bandwidth than you.

Firewalls, spyware, viruses, apps aren't really that big a deal, IMO. They use very little. There's programs to track that stuff... you could see how much you're using when you're not doing anything. In my experience, encryption uses up more resources, so if you're putting a heavy encryption on yours, check that.


tl;dr : Not much you can do. Use TCP optimizer

[forsaken1111]

You don't have to read everything, but be aware of what you're installing. I've lost count of the times I have gone to fix a friend's computer only to find they've installed some 'helpful' toolbar alongside some legitimate product just because they didn't reach what they were agreeing to as they click next. It only takes a second or two to look at the options on each page of the install screen, and when you see "Install our fabulous search bar which will help you find stuff and show you relevant ads!" you really should uncheck that box.

[SolarShado]

Gawd... I hate browser toolbars...

I could kind of understand before integrated search boxes were standard, but now? *sigh*

[Astramancer]

Yeah, those toolbars blow.  I remember looking at the unshown toolbars on the computers at school.....  God.  Just for kicks I enabled them all, and the actual viewable space for the internet was less than 2 inches tall.

I left them enabled

[Muz]

You don't have to read everything, but be aware of what you're installing. I've lost count of the times I have gone to fix a friend's computer only to find they've installed some 'helpful' toolbar alongside some legitimate product just because they didn't reach what they were agreeing to as they click next. It only takes a second or two to look at the options on each page of the install screen, and when you see "Install our fabulous search bar which will help you find stuff and show you relevant ads!" you really should uncheck that box.

Ah, I always untick those damn toolbars. I thought you mean some sneaky thing hidden in those damn licenses or something.

[SirHoneyBadger]

porn was impossible,

 
Porn is never impossible.

[forsaken1111]

You don't have to read everything, but be aware of what you're installing. I've lost count of the times I have gone to fix a friend's computer only to find they've installed some 'helpful' toolbar alongside some legitimate product just because they didn't reach what they were agreeing to as they click next. It only takes a second or two to look at the options on each page of the install screen, and when you see "Install our fabulous search bar which will help you find stuff and show you relevant ads!" you really should uncheck that box.

Ah, I always untick those damn toolbars. I thought you mean some sneaky thing hidden in those damn licenses or something.

Nah, you might be surprised how many 'extra little things' even high profile programs will try to install. Have you ever tried putting JUST quicktime on your computer? No no, they want you to install all kinds of shit, last time I tried.

[SolarShado]

Yeah... if i wanted Safari or iTunes, I'd install them. I just wanna watch a @&^$# video!

porn was impossible,

 
Porn is never impossible.

Someone needs to Google "ASCII porn"

[Virex]

And over all, I hate torrents. They literally flood the system with lots of small packets. The problem with TCP is that it tries to gives all connections equal priority. So if you open one to access YouTube and someone opens a dozen connections to download a movie, that someone gets 12 times more overall bandwidth than you.

To illustrate, the most popular network is gnutella, with over 3 million users. Even if only a part of them are on-line, you're easily looking at a million peers. Now, that in itself is not so bad, but it's a decentralized, unstructured network that uses a flood algorithm to find resources. What that means is that if you're looking for something, the program you use to connect to the network sends a message to a bunch of peers it knows, it's "neighbors". When they receive the request they either reply or relay the message to ALL their neighbors (excluding the one they got the message from). In the original protocol, each node would have 5 neighbors and because the network is so big, there is almost no interconnectivity between nodes. Messages could go up to 7 hops. This means that if your search only returned a few results (so that all nodes were reached) you spent 78 125 messages. Now multiply that number by, for example, a quarter million (That's a number high up in the billions) to get a rough idea of the amount of messages the network could generate in a short time span. And then you're only talking about finding the resources. The modern version uses significantly less hops, but on the flip side more searches are being conducted, meaning it's still using up a lot of traffic.

Firewalls, spyware, viruses, apps aren't really that big a deal, IMO. They use very little. There's programs to track that stuff... you could see how much you're using when you're not doing anything. In my experience, encryption uses up more resources, so if you're putting a heavy encryption on yours, check that.

Doesn't that depend on the encryption you're using. While the safest forms of encryption rely on a key as big as the message itself, essentially doubling the load, for less stringent situations one could use a significantly smaller key, or even rely on knowledge that is already present on the other side.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Someone needs to Google "ASCII porn"

Rule 34 is always in effect. 

[Muz]

Firewalls, spyware, viruses, apps aren't really that big a deal, IMO. They use very little. There's programs to track that stuff... you could see how much you're using when you're not doing anything. In my experience, encryption uses up more resources, so if you're putting a heavy encryption on yours, check that.

Doesn't that depend on the encryption you're using. While the safest forms of encryption rely on a key as big as the message itself, essentially doubling the load, for less stringent situations one could use a significantly smaller key, or even rely on knowledge that is already present on the other side.

The whole purpose of most encryptions is to get an attacker to do way more calculations than the secured computer, so they're deliberately designed to be computationally intensive. It's certainly not just "double" the load, it's exponentially more for the non-symmetric ones, and still a heck lot more for the symmetric (most common) type. It won't actually affect transmission itself, but it'll affect the router's resources and your computer, to an extent.

And with more modern encryption methods, it's sort of like sticking a key in a box, encrypting that box, putting it in another box and encrypting that, and then another... and decrypting is unlocking the box, getting the key, unlocking another box... that kind of thing will take some kind of toll if you do it more than you need.

Well, point is, just don't over do it. No matter how complex it is, there's already tools to crack some of the most common ones.

porn was impossible,

 
Porn is never impossible.

Someone needs to Google "ASCII porn"

You think you're kidding, but at that point in life, I was actually into ASCII porn